The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby surfaces in Taylor Swift’s writing through its green light and its glittering parties, longing and disillusion dressed in old money.
Appears in 4 songs
Associated with Daisy Buchanan
“Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names”
Uncle Jerry identifies echoes of The Great Gatsby in both the extravagance (champagne in swimming pools, outlandish outfits, crazy jewelry) and the narrative style, the story told through outsiders looking in, never truly knowing the central figure. Angela & Uncle Jerry note that Gatsby is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway who walks with Jay Gatsby but never truly knows him, paralleling how the townspeople narrate Rebekah's life without understanding it. Angela also notes Taylor has other songs with Gatsby allusions, including one from Reputation where she says 'we were swimming in a champagne sea.'
“Roaring twenties, tossing pennies in the pool”
Angela & Uncle Jerry read the line 'Roaring twenties, tossing pennies in the pool' as a cultural allusion to the 1920s and a possible literary allusion to The Great Gatsby. Uncle Jerry notes that 'anytime someone says Roaring Twenties, I think that that always comes up in our head,' and Angela confirms Taylor makes references to The Great Gatsby often. The allusion works on two levels: the 1920s party culture Fitzgerald chronicled (the extravagant, wish-filled era before the crash) and Taylor's own twenties as a decade of youthful hoping. The pennies-in-the-pool image, which Uncle Jerry reads as wishes thrown into a dark, unknowable future, echoes Gatsby's green light across the water, the wish for something just out of reach.
“I won't confess that I waited, but I let the lamp burn”
Community readers liken the lamp the speaker keeps burning at the window to the green light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby, a light that stands in for a longed-for figure who never comes. The same gesture carries the idiom of carrying a torch, or keeping an old flame.
“I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool, who takes my spot next to you”
The line “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool, who takes my spot next to you” echoes Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, who hopes her infant daughter will grow up “a beautiful little fool”, the best thing she believes a girl can be in a world that punishes women for seeing clearly. Taylor turns Daisy’s resigned wish into the narrator’s bitter blessing on the woman who will replace her.